For anybody living in Beijing, the reverse seemed true: the Olympics, or at least the idea of the Olympics, was taking over the city. Tens of thousands of workers, students, and volunteers had been mobilized to clean up streets, and the government had embarked on an ambitious urban beautification program. It involved a lot of paint. They painted the highway guardrails white, and they dyed the grass in Tiananmen Square green. They splashed Old World colors onto Brave New World housing projects. Shortly before the commission arrived, many of the city’s proletarian apartment blocks seemed to
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